It seems simple enough, but this film takes a basic potboiler premise and takes it to a mindbogglingly high level of sublime and artful horror. Phibes isn't just mad with lust for revenge; he is a genius of high order: a doctor, an inventor, a scientist, and a concert musician. Phibes manages to weave all of his various skills and interests into his revenge, and still takes time out of his murderous rampage for a waltz with his stylish assistant,…

Watching the pudgy little guy bluster and whistle and sweat his way from bad situation to worse situation, all the while simultaneously aided and blocked, sometimes in the same sentence, by his best pal, Bud. That's what Abbott and Costello are all about, and this one delivers the goods, albeit in a reduced fashion. However, the inclusion of Karloff adds a large dose of fun to the proceedings, and his influence often elevates even the hoariest of material. He certainly does here.

Deep inside my memories is the realization that I used to (more than occasionally) watch the seeming trainwreck that was The Morton Downey, Jr. Show back in the late 1980s. Part of those memories conjures a slipshod form of timewarp that leads me to believe the show was on far longer than it actually was, just under two years in reality. The keyword here is ‘reality,’ because the massive influence of the show is still with us today, where we…

Bio

I have watched over 14,000 feature-length films in the fifty-plus years of my forced stay on this planet. Over the past dozen years and more, I have averaged seeing over two feature-length films per day annually. You can do the math. Short films and cartoons are the gravy on top…